Biden Offers Companies Millions To Help U.S. Break Russia's Monopoly On A Vital Resource

The Biden administration showed up to last month’s global climate summit in Dubai with a radical new plan to replace coal and compete again with Russia and China over a technology American scientists pioneered.

The United States led nearly two dozen other nations in a pledge to triple the world’s supply of nuclear power by 2050. While most of the reactors under construction in other countries today are Russian models, the U.S. promoted its growing slate of high-tech startups with cutting-edge reactor designs as an American alternative to working with the Kremlin.

The big problem with that pitch? The small, next-generation nuclear reactors companies like the one billionaire Bill Gates backs are designed to run on a potent but rare type of uranium fuel with only one commercial supplier on the market: the Russian government.

Last autumn, a facility in Ohio began the nation’s first domestic production of what’s called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU (pronounced HAY - loo ). But it’s still at a small scale.

Now the Biden administration is trying to entice more companies into the market.

On Tuesday, the Department of Energy offered private companies a minimum of $2 million each to start producing HALEU domestically, the second part of a $500 million tranche of federal dollars for nuclear fuel production from President Joe Biden’s climate-spending law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The agency announced the first for a separate part of the HALEU-making process in November.

“Boosting our domestic uranium supply won’t just advance President Biden’s historic climate agenda,” Ali Zaidi, Biden’s national climate adviser, said in a statement, “but also increase America’s energy security, create good-paying union jobs,